Wyndham Hotel guests at risk for identity theft

A data breach at Wyndham Hotels & Resorts may have put up to 21,000 Florida residents in jeopardy of identity theft, Bill McCollum, Florida’s attorney general, said in a statement.

Wyndham reported the data breach to the AG last December and told the office it had contacted consumers of the unauthorized access to personal data on their debit and credit cards. So far, Wyndham believes no criminal identity theft related to the use of the consumer data has been identified.

McCollum encouraged consumers to be vigilant and to report any suspicious contacts they receive or activity on their accounts to law enforcement. Affected consumers are encouraged to take the precautionary steps outlined in a letter from Wyndham, including obtaining a free fraud alert from one of the credit reporting agencies.

There are 12 Wyndham properties in Florida, including three in the Orlando area.

Once again, we have another data breach that has left thousands of innocent people vulnerable to identity theft. As I have said so many times on here before, it is not what you do with your data, but it is out there in all these places beyond your control. As usual, the company that was affected comes out right after and tries to comfort the people by saying “there is no evidence that the data has been used”. How could they possibly know that and that does not speak to any other area of identity theft. People need to know the whoe truth about identity theft, because the media is doing the people a real disservice by not giving the whole picute. To learn about Identity theft, log on to any of these websites: